Bryan Goodman and Cheryl Bird, dentistry students at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences school, have been leading other students in demanding the removal of the Forrest statue.
Brad Vest/The Commercial Appeal

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August 24, 2017 - Bryan Goodman, left, and Cheryl Bird, right, led a group of UTHSC students in protesting the Forrest monument that stands in Health Sciences Park. Goodman, president of the Student National Dental Association, and Bird, vice president of the Student National Dental Association, are both fourth-year dental students and decided to take a stand against the statue. "We really wanted to give everyone who is like minded the opportunity to show up and let everyone know that this is not something that we accept," Goodman said.(Photo: Brad Vest/The Commercial Appeal)Buy Photo

Forrest hurt black people — people who make up 65 percent of this city. He sold and owned slaves. He led a massacre of black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow as they surrendered, a massacre so savage that their blood dyed the Mississippi River red.

And he was once the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist organization that terrorizes African-Americans to this day.

In other words, Forrest did a lot a harm.

That’s why Bird and Goodman, both 27, recently led 90 UT health sciences students in a lunchtime rally to have Forrest’s statue removed from the park. To them, it not only defies the mission of the school, it defiles it.

“I was really shocked at the number of people who said, ‘Yes, we’ll be there,’ once we started reaching out,” said Bird. “We got there and 90 people showed up, and I think that’s a fraction of the people who really wanted to show up…

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Students from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center protest on the steps leading up to the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest at the Health Sciences Park.(Photo: Mark Weber / The Commercial Appeal)

“We wanted to show that students here, and not just random people, want it to come down. We have to walk by it and see this statue every day. When we graduate, this name (health sciences center) is going to be on our diplomas, so it’s (protesting Forrest statue in the park) part of our professionalism as well.”

Goodman, in fact, said UT’s role in maintaining the park — which was renamed Health Sciences Park in 2013 — also sparked his activism.

“UT cuts the grass, it maintains it, and we have a lot of events here,” he said. “So as soon as I made the connection that UT has an official role, I knew that UT students had a right to voice their opinion about it.”

They do.

The Forrest statue has been in the park since 1905, when it was named Bedford Forrest Park, and his remains, as well as those of his wife, are buried beneath it.

But the oppression and injustice that it stood for stands out even more now that the park is named for an entity that is about healing people.

And each time Bird and Goodman see patients of color, they are reminded of how the dental problems they suffer from stem from a lack of access to care because of poverty and systemic racism — racism that the statue of Forrest represents.

“We see people who have not been able to go to the dentist in five or 10 years,” Goodman said. “We see children who have made it to middle school who have never been to a dentist…the majority of them are people of color…

“This statue only represents that racial divide. It doesn’t have a place here because it’s away from our mission and what it’s (the school) trying to bestow upon us. It is contradictory.”

For their part, Bird and Goodman say they plan to continue to push for the removal of the statue. For now, that will be tough, as the state legislature forces the city to apply for a waiver from the Tennessee Historical Commission to remove such statues. The commission denied the city’s waiver application last year, and the city plans to appeal if it does so again.

Yet what’s important here is how the protests of students like Bird and Goodman further illuminate how statues and memorials to Confederate generals have no place in the context of modern life and civility.

They have no place in public parks where people of all colors and backgrounds play together, picnic together and listen to concerts and music together — because the main purpose for Forrest, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and other Confederates for going to war was for people NOT to be able to do those things together.

So, there is no good reason for Forrest’s statue to remain where it is. And, as Bird and Goodman have shown, especially not a healthy one.